Siegfried Lenz

Siegfried Lenz (German: [ˈziːkfʁiːt ˈlɛnts] ^ⓘ; 17 March 1926 – 7 October 2014) was a German writer of novels, short stories and essays, as well as dramas for radio and the theatre. In 2000 he received the Goethe Prize on the 250th Anniversary of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's birth. He won the 2010 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Siegfried Lenz was born in Lyck, East Prussia (now Ełk, Poland), the son of a customs officer. After graduating in 1943 he was drafted into the Kriegsmarine.

According to documents released in June 2007, he joined the Nazi Party at the age of 18 on 20 April 1944 along with several other German authors and personalities such as Dieter Hildebrandt and Martin Walser. However Lenz subsequently said he had been included in a collective ‘joining’ of the Party without his knowledge. In World War II he was a soldier in the German Kriegsmarine and served as a Fähnrich zur See (officer cadet) on the Admiral Scheer, the German auxiliary cruiser Hansa, and for a short period in Naestved in Denmark. Shortly after the German surrender at Lüneburg Heath he deserted and was held briefly as a prisoner of war in Schleswig-Holstein. He then worked as an interpreter for the British army.

At the University of Hamburg, he studied philosophy, English and literary history. His studies were cut off early when he became an intern for the daily newspaper Die Welt, where he served as an editor from 1950 to 1951. It was there he met his future wife, Liselotte, whom he married in 1949.

In 1951, Lenz used the money he had earned from his first novel, Habichte in der Luft ("Hawks in the air"), to finance a trip to Kenya. During his time there he wrote about the Mau Mau Uprising in his short story "Lukas, sanftmütiger Knecht" ("Luke, gentle servant"). After 1951, Lenz worked as a freelance writer in Hamburg, where he joined the Group 47 group of writers. Together with Günter Grass he became engaged with the Social Democratic Party and championed the Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt. As a supporter of rapprochement with Eastern Europe, he was a member of the German delegation at the signing of the Treaty of Warsaw (1970). In October 2011, he was made an honorary citizen of his home town Ełk, which had become Polish as a result of the border changes promulgated at the 1945 Potsdam Conference.

In 2003, Lenz joined the Verein für deutsche Rechtschreibung und Sprachpflege (Society for German Spelling and Language Cultivation) to protest against the German orthography reform of 1996.

His wife, Liselotte, died in 2006 after 57 years of marriage. Four years later he married his 74-year-old neighbour, Ulla, who had helped him after the death of his wife. Siegfried Lenz died at the age of 88 on 7 October 2014 in Hamburg.

After his death, a previously unpublished novel, Der Überläufer ("The Turncoat"), which Lenz had written in 1951, was published. Found among his effects, it is a novel about a German soldier who defects to Soviet forces.